Study to track how many prisoners reoffend

Individual prisoners will be tracked for up to five years to determine how many reoffend in a new study of the Irish prison population.

The research project on recidivism is the first of its kind to be conducted in Ireland. It will inform Government policy on imprisonment, and measure the effectiveness of sentencing.

The research will reveal the age profile of those who reoffend, and which areas are recidivism blackspots.

It will also identify how many repeat offenders are drug addicts, and will reveal how many prison sentences have been served by the State's worst repeat offenders.

The research, which is already under way, is being carried out by the Institute of Criminology at University College Dublin.

It has been funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences. The work is being assisted by researchers from the University of Missouri and St Louis, who have carried out similar recidivism studies in small jurisdictions such as Malta and Iceland.

Dr Ian O'Donnell, the deputy director of the Institute of Criminology, said the findings of the study should redress the vacuum of information on recidivism and the wider penal system in the Republic.

"Generally, we don't have a very strong tradition in Ireland in this kind of research. Our own institute in UCD was only established four years ago, but other countries would have had similar agencies from the 19th century."

News of the research comes at a time when the prison population is rising, and its make-up has significantly changed. Statistics released by the Irish Prison Service show there were 2,608 committals of non-nationals to prisons last year. This was an increase of 66 per cent since 2001.

In 1994, 70 prisoners were serving life. This increased to 118 by 2001, and has climbed to 162 at present. Similarly, the number of remand prisoners has shown a very large increase, from 116 in 1994 to 564 at present.

Ireland's female prison population has trebled since the 1990s.